HUMAN RIGHTS AND WORLD LITERATURE
CMLIT 143 (Penn State) | undergraduate survey

This course examines the relationship between global cultural production and human rights. It asks not just “what are human rights?” but also: “how does literature—particularly as it responds to human rights violations—shape, deepen, and complicate our understanding of human rights?” The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, written shortly after the founding of the United Nations and in the wake of World War II, is the starting point from which we will explore responses to the legacies of the Holocaust, military dictatorships in Argentina and Chile, genocide in Rwanda, and the detention and torture of prisoners in the Global War on Terror. Materials are drawn from a range of story-telling forms, including: the graphic novel, the memoir, the novel, long-form journalism, photography, and film.

Image: Marcelo Brodsky, “Class Photo, 1967” from Buena Memoria (1996)

Ethics, Justice, and Rights in World Literature
CMLIT 455 (Penn State) | advanced Undergraduate seminar

This course explores the intersections of literature and what Martha Nussbaum called the “public imagination.” Literature asks us to (imaginatively) concern ourselves with the lives of others and thereby inflects our ideas about policy, law, and justice. It is therefore central to how we comprehend, articulate, and disseminate ideas of rights, justice, and ethics in the world. The semester begins with a unit on crime narratives, where stories about law-breaking raise the question of what (or, who) determines what constitutes a crime and, from there, what will rate as justice. The second unit turns attention to the “human” in human rights: who and what counts as human? What happens when that which is designated as “non-human” claims the rights preserved for the human? The final weeks focus on the limits of our empathetic imagination, foregrounding narratives that explore our ability (or, inability) to comprehend and relay stories that are not our own.

Image: Ex Machina, directed by Alex Garland (2015)

Writing the Twenty-First Century: Past, Present, future
CMLIT 489: Contemporary World Fiction (Penn State) | advanced Undergraduate seminar

“Contemporariness,” writes Giorgio Agamben, is “a singular relationship with one’s own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it. More precisely, it is that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and anachronism. Those who coincide too well with the epoch, those who are perfectly tied to it in every respect, are not contemporary, precisely because they do not manage to see it; they are not able to firmly hold it in their gaze.” To be contemporary means not just to be in or of the current moment, but to be able to take distance from it and thereby better understand the dynamics unfolding in the present. “Contemporariness,” therefore, is a way of seeing.

This course is a survey of contemporary world fiction; that is, of works published since the turn of the twenty-first century that aim to describe or convey something about the present moment. The semester will unfold in three overlapping parts: first, we will explore at what it means to be “contemporary” and write about the (or, a) present. Second, we will engage with recent examples of historical fiction, which look to the past in order to reflect on social and political dynamics in the present. And, finally, we will analyze recent works of speculative fiction, which are as much about the present as they are about a possible future.

Image: Kiluanji Kia Henda, “A City Called Mirage” (2013)

THE CITY: FORM AND FUNCTION
GLIS 400: SEMINAR IN GLOBAL AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES (Penn State) | Undergraduate capstone Seminar

This interdisciplinary course offers a wide-ranging exploration of the city as a key site in global and international studies. Topics include: theories that influenced the discourses of urban planning in the twentieth century; the power dynamics that shaped cities in colonial and postcolonial Africa; current issues in city planning in the Global South, including new cities and informal settlements (so-called “slums”); as well as migration and the making of multicultural and “global” cities. Course materials are drawn from urban studies, history, sociology, anthropology, economics, political theory, literature, and cultural studies.

Image: “Dome over Manhattan,” rendering by F. Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao (1960)

Studies in Literary Genres: The Novel as Global Form
Cmlit 504: studies in Literary Genres (Penn StatE) | graduate seminar

“The study of the novel as a genre,” writes Mikhail Bakhtin in “Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel” (1975), “is distinguished by peculiar difficulties. This is due to the unique nature of the object itself: the novel is the sole genre that continues to develop, that is as yet uncompleted.” Taking Bakhtin’s observation as both starting point and guiding principle, this seminar offers a wide-ranging survey in theories of the novel, including of what the novel is (questions of genre and form), of how it developed (its relationship to other narrative forms), of how it works (its internal dynamics, narrative modes, etc.), and, finally, of what it does in the world. The readings are drawn from a range of narrative and critical traditions, juxtaposing European theories of the novel with the ways in which these questions have been engaged elsewhere in the world, hence the reference to the novel as a “global” form in the course title. A crucial component of the course will be attention to the centrality of the novel—specifically, of the “globalization” of the novel”—to theorizations of world literature post-2000, as a means to engage with recent debates about the “global novel” in contemporary literature.

Image: Julie Mehretu, “This Manifestation of Historical Restlessness” (2022)

THE GLOBAL SOUTH: HISTORY, POLITICS, METHOD
CMLIT 543: Literary Relations (Penn State) | graduate seminar

This course is an introduction to and exploration of the Global South as an historical formation, as a (political) concept, and as a framework for literary and cultural analysis. It will address three principal aspects: (1) the emergence of the Global South as a historical and theoretical formation; (2) the function of the Global South as a political imaginary; and (3) the potential of the Global South as a framework for the comparative analysis of literature and culture.

Image: Carlos Amorales, “Useless Wonder Maps 1” (2010)

Narrative Ontologies: Magical Realism, World Literature, and Representation of/in the Global South
CMLIT 543: LITERARY RELATIONS (Penn State) | graduate seminar

This course explores departures from realism in the literatures of the Global South, deviations that may or may not be productively termed “magical realism.” The goal will be to consider the utility (and limits) of magical realism as a literary-critical category. “Magical realism,” therefore, serves as a case study the challenges of—and methodologies necessary for—transcontinental (and trans-historical) comparison. The first part of the semester will be spent historicizing the term in its European, Caribbean, and Latin American circulations, before turning attention to the global re-articulations of magical realism from the 1970s onwards.

Image: Franz Roh, “Strange Arc” (1930)

African Literatures and the Cold War
cmlit 596/afr 597: independent study (Penn State) | graduate seminar

This course provides an overview of post-independence African literatures, with a focus on the relationship between African cultural production and the Cold War, as the cultural and political backdrop against which the consolidation of post-independence African literatures and their study took place. The “Cold War” here names both a historical period overlapping with decolonization on the continent and the context of ideological oppositions within which post-independence state and cultural institutions took shape. Readings take a transnational approach, drawing material from across the continent and a variety of languages (English, French, Arabic, Portuguese, and Gikuyu) while also offering extended focus on some of the key figures of the post-independence period (Chinua Achebe, Ousmane Sembène, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Alex La Guma).Topics include anti-colonialism and decolonization; decolonization and disillusionment; the role of the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) and the making of post-independence literary institutions; Afro-Asian solidarity networks and the Afro-Asian Writers Bureau (AAWB); and, finally, the ways in which works produced after the end of the Cold War look back to and think through the structuring conflicts of those years.

Image: Kiluanji Kia Henda, "Under the Silent Eye of Lenin" (2017) (detail)